Summer 2009 PIM roll-call

Posted by Alexander Deliyannis
Aug 1, 2009 at 10:19 PM

Tom S. wrote:
>How is what you
>described for Evernote different from gmail with the google toolbar’s “send to”
>function? I find gmail’s tagging system faster and easier to use with the relevant
>shortcut keys and all of my filing is consistent across every type of electronic
>data.

I’ve never used Gmail that way, so I can’t comment much on the data collection itself. I think Dan already mentioned that EverNote maintains the source URL—I don’t know if Gmail does that. I would add that from my own experience EverNote and Surfulater are very good at capturing web info in a way that is relatively faithful to the source, but also easy to read—and editable; does Gmail give you the ability to edit a message in your Inbox? I guess not.

I do use Gmail for mail and one of my main problems with it is its inability to organise messages in any kind of hierarchy, whether through folders or tags. Call me old-fashioned, but this is the only forum I have been following and contributing to for goodness knows how long, precisely because I need outlines to make sense of the world.

>I’m not being argumentative. I’m really wondering if I’m missing something
>about Evernote.

Other than the above, the main strength for me is offline access; EverNote started out as software rather than webware, and though now it’s a hybrid, my data is always in my disk for me to access regardless of internet connection. Google Gears is for me a poor substitute for genuinely keeping the underlying database locally (+backing up on the web).

alx